Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Paul Ronto, from RunRepeat:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to RunRepeat?
A: RunRepeat is the world’s largest athletic footwear review site on the web. Our goal is to make the shoe buying process easier by collecting expert reviews and testimonials for every pair of athletic footwear available from around the world. We also partner with over 250 retailers to ensure users can find the footwear they are looking for at the absolute best price. Combined, these services save both time and money, users no longer need to search out their own reviews, or scour the web for the best price, we do all the heavy lifting so users can spend more time out there enjoying the sports they love.
Recommended: Q: You’ve recently conducted the largest study ever on the sport of ultra running with the help of the International Association of Ultrarunners. What did you find out?
A: This is correct, we looked at over 5 million finish times from over 15K ultra races and the data uncovered some interesting trends. First off, we discovered that female ultra runners are faster than male ultra runners at distances over 195 miles and that the longer the distance the shorter the gender pace gap. In 5Ks men run 17.9% faster than women, at marathon distance the difference is just 11.1%, 100-mile races see the difference shrink to just .25%, and above 195 miles, women are actually 0.6% faster than men. Participation in ultras has also increased significantly, by 1676% in the last 23 years from 34,401 to 611,098 and 345% in the last 10 years from 137,234 to 611,098. There have never been more ultra runners then today. More ultra runners are also competing in multiple events per year. In 1996, only 14% of runners participated in multiple ultra races a year, now 41% of participants run more than one event per year, leading ultra running to having the most obsessed user base, with higher rates of return runners than any other distance.
There’s a host of other findings too like, there have never been more women in ultrarunning, ultra runners have never been slower across, the fastest ultra running nations are South Africa, Sweden, and Germany, and a record amount of people travel abroad for ultra running events.
Q: How exactly does your review system work? How often are the CoreScores updated?
A: We collect reviews from all over the web and all over the world, these are real user reviews, athlete reviews, and reviews from expert testers. We aggregate all these reviews into a simple-to-read list of why to buy or why not to buy, and users on our site can digest this information in under 30 seconds. Some products we’ll read over 1000 reviews and spend 20-30 hours researching, all in the name of getting the user the best info, from real consumers and experts. The CoreScore is our own RunRepeat scoring system where we rank each product from 0-100 to give the users on our site yet another data point to filter products by. This score is a weighted average of reviews and ratings and indicates how liked a shoe is based on user feedback. It’s pretty simple, search our site by brand, purpose, or CoreScore, and find the right shoe quickly, easily, and at the best price.
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Q: What’s the best thing about RunRepeat that people might not know about?
A: Shoes are really hard to buy online. No matter how much the world goes digital, shoes still fit on an individual basis and buying them without trying them on is always a risk. We make that risk much lower by informing consumers what other real people have had to say about the products before they spend their hard-earned money. We believe in the power of community over the budgets of the big brands, and know that the most popular shoes are not always the best shoes. Our company is run by sport fanatics, we care that you find the right pair f shoes, enough to commit our lives to making this process better.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We love sport here at RunRepeat, and spend a ton of energy exploring what’s going on in the world of sport. Our studies like the State of Ultra Running 2020 don’t lead to more sales, it’s an insane acquisition that we do these stories for profit, but it’s our passion, we were intrigued by what was going on in the sport, so we took the time to dig a little deeper than anyone else. So if you love sport and the data and trends within sport, stay tuned to RunRepeat, we’ll be continuing to publish top-notch content that may surprise you in 2020!
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